Chem'ivillu' (Let's Speak Cahuilla)

INTRODUCTION

Cahuilla is a language of the Takic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family of American Indian
languages, spoken on several reservations in Southern California, mostly in Riverside
County. Chem'ivillu' is the first textbook developed for those who want to learn Cahuilla as
a second language. It is also the first book devoted entirely to the Mountain dialect of
Cahuilla, which is spoken by Katherine Siva Sauvel and others on the Morongo Indian
Reservation in Banning, California.

The present version of the book is revised from Cahuilla lessons prepared by a group of
graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles, during the Fall of 1977,
under the direction of Pamela Munro and Katherine Siva Sauvel. Brent de Chene, Heather
Hardy, and Lynn Gordon assisted with various aspects of the revision; Yolanda Elaine
Childers did the typing; and Alice Anderton and Lynn Gordon helped with proofreading.
Mariano Sauvel provided valuable confirmation of the Cahuilla data. The project was
funded by a grant from the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, under the sponsorship of
the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

This book could never have been written without the excellent foundation of prior
research on Cahuilla by Hansjakob Seller, Roderick A. Jacobs, and William Bright. We
made extensive use of Seller's descriptive works, which are listed in the section on
'* Studying More Cahuilla*' at the end of this book, and Jacobs' hook Syntactic Change: A
Cupan (UtO'Aztecan) Case Study (University of California Publications in Linguistics 79)
was also a great help. Seller made helpful suggestions about our manuscript; Bright and
Jacobs kindly gave us field notes of their own woric with Mrs. Sauvel and other speakers of
the language; and Bright lent us his invaluable lexical and grammatical files.

We thank all of those who have helped with this book. Please give us your comments!

Katherine Siva Sauvel

Pamela Munro

UCLA, 1980

Munro, Pamela and Katherine Siva Sauvel. 1980.
Chem'iviUu' (Let's Speak Cahuilla). UCLA:
American Indian Studies Center.